Police officers posted to schools in the north of England are using force against children as young as 10 years old, openDemocracy can reveal.

The findings add to pressure on authorities to remove officers from classrooms following previous revelations about the mistreatment of children. 

Last year, West Yorkshire Police’s ‘safer schools officers’ recorded 65 incidents involving the use of force against children, according to data obtained by openDemocracy through a Freedom of Information request.

At least 60 of those incidents involved officers using physical force against children, which police define as “holding, pinning or restraining of a person” but also could include “pushing, pulling, striking or pinning someone to the ground”.

Children were handcuffed by West Yorkshire police 17 times and one child under the age of 11 was restrained on the ground by an officer. Five children, all of them under 15 – two girls and three boys – were recorded as having been injured by officers. 

openDemocracy compared the ethnicities recorded of the children involved in incidents with the numbers of secondary schoolchildren in Bradford, Calderdale Kirklees, Leeds and Wakefield last year. 

Our analysis suggests that Black schoolchildren were almost six times as likely to have force used against them by safer schools officers than their white peers in 2022. Of the four cases in which West Yorkshire Police said its safer schools officers had used force against kids under 11, all involved Black children.

Last year a national outcry was prompted after officers from the Met Police in London were found to have strip-searched a 15-year-old girl, known as Child Q, at her Hackney school over a false accusation that she possessed cannabis.

The incident led to the largest teachers’ union demanding an end to using officers in schools. National Education Union (NEU) president Daniel Kebede said at the time that the case highlighted “a growing trend in which police are ever-present in schools”, leading to the increased criminalisation of children.

“Some say I’m wrong and [the] police can provide a pastoral role, but I don’t think that’s right. They degraded, abused and humiliated Child Q,” Kebede said.

Teachers in the same borough, Hackney, had previously been at the forefront of a campaign to get police out of schools during the 1970s and 1980s.

West Yorkshire Police said in response to a separate Freedom of Information request that it had a total of 38 safer school officers in 2022. It told openDemocracy that there were three complaints made against its safer schools officers that year. 

Schools contribute a certain percentage of an officer’s salary in exchange for them spending a proportion of their time on school grounds.

The number of use of force incidents recorded by West Yorkshire Police was significantly higher than the other 13 police forces that responded to openDemocracy’s Freedom of Information request, six of which said their officers had used no force at all.

There were 14 use of force incidents recorded by safer schools officers in total in 2022 by Gwent Police, Dyfed Powys Police, Norfolk Constabulary, North Wales Police, Nottinghamshire Police and Surrey Police.

At least three children, all aged between 11 and 15, were injured by safer schools officers.

Of the 44 police forces openDemocracy asked, 16 refused to answer our Freedom of Information requests, claiming it would take too long to find and collate the requested information. Thirteen said they did not actually have the information, while two are yet to reply.

Forces that refused include the Met, which is the UK’s largest and has more than 480 safer schools officers, and Police Scotland, which has almost 100.

At least 29 police forces said they had safer schools officers in 2022 in response to a separate Freedom of Information request.

Shabna Begum, director of research at Runnymede Trust, said: "Sadly, we are not surprised by these distressing statistics which echo the Casey Review’s findings about the disproportionate use of force against Black Londoners by Metropolitan Police officers. Casey’s conclusion that the Met Police Service is institutionally racist is likely reflected in the problems that persist in policing on a national scale.

"These statistics show just how badly Black and minority ethnic children are being failed by their schools and the police. A school’s first concern should be safeguarding the students in their care, while safer schools officers have a duty to treat pupils as children first and foremost. No child should experience the traumatising use of force in a place where they should be safe. We remain steadfast in our position that police have no place in our children’s schools."

West Yorkshire Police said they “maintained engagement with schools through the Safer Schools Partnership, a national way of working to foster intensive and long-term engagement with the school community whether pupils, teachers, governors or parents”.

They added that the duties of safer schools officers could include “classroom-based inputs on topics relating to the personal safety of pupils and policing priorities which impact upon young people, mentoring/advice to young people, advising school staff on behaviour and discipline matters, and operational/neighbourhood policing duties similar to those performed by their colleagues in the community (e.g. arrest, investigation, engagement etc)”.

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